Michael Mancini freely, unabashedly expresses single-minded concentration on one objective with regard to his future.
Just short of celebrating his 20th birthday, the erstwhile three-sport ace at Maine-Endwell High whose resume includes the designation “World Champion” has it mapped out. He makes it sound as if it’s an expectation rather than mere wishes or dreams.
“My Dad always tells me, ‘You’ve got to think outside of baseball.’ But I don’t ever think about that,” he said. “There is no Plan B. There is one road. It’s not a straight road but I see the end line. I don’t know what’s in-between but playing baseball at the professional level is where I intend to go.”
Through his first year removed from the local athletic scene, he’s done his prospects no harm whatsoever.
Mancini was an every-game starter at second base in his freshman season for James Madison University, a Sun Belt Conference member in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Team leader in walks and triples, he batted .284, settling into the No. 4 spot in the order for the 56-game season’s second half.
He proceeded to a fine summer with the Kingsport (Tenn.) Axmen of the Appalachian League, a collegiate league stocked mostly with freshmen and sophomores. That trophy symbolic of his selection as Appy League All-Star Game MVP late last month joins an already fetching display of awards.
He acclimated summarily, learned, improved and persevered through predictably unavoidable stretches of struggle and emerged wiser, humbled here and there, but increasingly ambitious to pursue the destination. Through 96 baseball games across 5½ months, he remained thankfully healthy and productive, having embraced demands of physical conditioning required to handle a degree of grind previously not experienced.
The transition from high school to an intensified workload is obviously one many before him have negotiated, only, not so many hereabouts as successfully as he has at that level of baseball.
“I…
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